Top 5 Tips for Marketing with Facebook

Having trouble attracting the right audience on Facebook? Try these 5 tips to help market your business

Facebook is moving towards just being an advertising tool, and as such they're developing functions and models that help marketeers. Here are some of the ways to maximise your Facebook marketing.


1. Make a New Product and Boost it Announcement

Despite all the fake accounts on Facebook - boosting posts is still relatively effective as you will stay in the Newsfeed for longer. Use this for announcements, not advertisements - by keeping it to news you don't turn people off.


2. Make use of Your Newsfeed

How often do you look at pages? Most people on Facebook interact via the newsfeed - this is where the shares and likes are won from. Avoid writing updates that require people to go to your page and leave the newsfeed, such as entering a competition. Try using ActionSprout to allow someone to sign, join, enter from the newsfeed itself.

3. Customise your Marketing to your Audience

You can target your marketing on Facebook and reach specific fans. One such tip is using the 'Custom Audience' option, especially if you post in multiple languages. You can also customise it to people who have visited your website, so know your users and set a different marketing message for them. Essentially you're getting to know your market better and targeting them based on what they are looking at.


4. Don't Run the Same Adverts

To make the most of your advertising efforts and maximise your budget - run a trial of adverts and use different keywords for each. Use only a small portion of your budget and find out which adverts have the best engagement. It may sound a hit and miss way to find your return on investment, but split testing gives the best results to find exactly what segments of the market your reaching and with which keywords.


5. Use Audience Insights

These measuring functions are there to help you and should be used! Take advantage of the insights and check when your users are most active - times of day, where and what they're looking at. This should make you better equipped to target your audience so use this as a tool and engage with them.


For more suggestions on how to market your business check out www.hosteldoctor.com

DOs & DON'Ts for SEO marketing

Search Engine Optimisation is maximising your webpage to achieve higher recognition and listing on search engines through natural (unpaid) search. You should be taking into account all major search engines but Google has a 65% market share globally. If you’re marketing to Asia then there are differences; for instance Google only has a 17% share in China with Baidu having an 80% market share, so do your research on local trends.

Do use meta descriptions, keywords and tags
Use a few concise meta descriptions, tags and keyword for your pages- then repeat them in your content. Don’t use too many – this counts for all search engines. If you have Chinese translation pages, Baidu has a website tool that tells you trending keywords so you can include these in your descriptions to maximise exposure – but you must use keywords relevant to your page. Try to register with search directories – some take a while and some (Yahoo) you can pay for, but they will immediately improve your ranking.

Don’t use ‘black hat’ tactics
If you stuff website with irrelevant keywords, cloak them, and add links to spam sites - Google will punish you. You are also preventing people from finding the relevant material they are searching for. You can even be removed from searches for this, so keep your content relevant and true – you will attract less visitors; but the right visitors. This goes for Social Media too – don’t buy likes, it won’t increase your bookings.

Do Optimise
Add ‘alt’ tags and a title for your images so they load faster, reduce them in file size so they are optimised for the space, and keep your page sizes under 100kb throughout the site – search speed has been incorporated into ranking for search results. Make sure you have a ‘contact us’ page and site maps for both users and search engines.

Do write great content
Despite many changes to Google with the latest algorithm - Hummingbird, overall content is still the most important factor for search. Big changes were made to keyword searches which anyone using Google Analytics will be aware of, but the purpose is to value the content of the whole site for relevance, and provide better search results for users. Focus on useful content for your users – tourist information, places to see, places to go, and information on your hostel. If your bounce rate is high, your content is not that relevant.

Don’t forget your key business
Yes, you need good content on your areas and activities for guests, but your website should be a booking tool and point of information about your hostel primarily. The rest of the information is great, but secondary. Make sure you are marketing yourself as a great place to stay and have an intuitive site that leads to booking. You want people to read about you, book and share positive reviews. Make sure your social pages all use your url also, it’s better for your brand and counts on search too.

Hostel Health Tip
Beware that on China’s Baidu search – Flash and JavaScript don’t work!

To find out more about changes to Google search with Hummingbird
see our blog article HERE.

Google's change to secure search and your SEO strategy

Google's Secure Search changes and what they mean to your hostel marketing
If you have and SEO strategy in place, you probably need to now rethink it. As Google has moved to secure search (using HTTPS), the ability to use and predict keywords trends in your online marketing has just been made a little more complicated.

The move to secure search means in simple terms, that you won't be able to track users by the keywords they've inputted into their search, as Google will no be passing their keyword search data to websites anymore. This is a big upheaval to SEO and anyone with an online strategy - you may have customers finding you through Bing or duckduckgo, but Google is the platform for around 65% of searches.

How does this affect your marketing?
Up until now, knowing what your customer is searching for, such as"best party hostel Barcelona" means not just knowing what your potential customers are looking for, but also what words and phrases are key to search. You then use these magic words in all your online marketing across all channels - your website, your blog, your social media, in the hope that repeating it will get you to the front page of Google when this is searched for so that your potential customer has a good chance of finding you. In short - you're speaking their language. The problem now, is you won't know what language that is.

The time spent tracking and adjusting various phrases and keywords is not not really necessary anymore when using Google analytics. You will still find keywords from other search sites while they're sharing this data, but you will need to change your strategy as times change. You are still attracting relatively the same people and have the same product offerings, but the patterns and trends in the customer will be more of a mystery than a means to attract them.

So what now?
It's not all bad news. It makes predicting changes in trends difficult, and if you're creating an SEO strategy without a professional you may experience some trial and error, but there are benefits too. Now the challenge is placed on creating content that is really relevant. Actually really relevant. You can no longer rely just on phrases that have buzz words, but your content has to be what someone is actually looking for. Writing great content such as city guides, top tourist attractions, bars, beaches and things to see will always be a safe strategy for getting traffic to your website, but they might not always be looking for a place to stay. The changes now force you to embrace a strategy that makes your key business your key content, and will rank it as such. Make sure you always have content for your primary purpose as a place to stay, as this should be the focus of customer's searches.

If you have a simplistic strategy in place that focusses on getting to the first page of Google and focussing on search terms, then this will mean some changes for you. Everyone in marketing shouts about content being king, and now this is more true than ever. Make your content relevant to your service and you will attract customers when it is relevant to their searches. Focus on drawing customers with content of real value and you should attract the right prospects for your business.
If you need some expert help - call a doctor!

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